Power usage matters a great deal in computing devices, in a number of different contexts. In one context, power matters in the event that the external power supply is lost. For example, solid-state storage devices (SSD) such as Flash memory are nonvolatile storage. Thus, devices writing to a SSD assume that data, once written, is permanently stored. However, in certain SSD devices, after receiving data, the SSD holds the data in volatile memory (such as DRAM, SRAM, registers, buffers, or the like) in order to perform a number of operations on the data. In the event of a power failure, data that is held in volatile memory may not be preserved.